Fear the Walking Dead: Colman Domingo is more fun than Strand

Colman Domingo, the actor behind the mysterious and charismatic Victor Strand on Fear the Walking Dead, is a fun-loving and charming guy.

Colman Domingo is one of our Twitter followers on Undead Walking and chats with me from time to time. I remember when Fear the Walking Dead first started and he tweeted about how his publicist told him he needed more Twitter followers. At that time he had about the same amount of followers as our Undead Walking account.

I teased that we would race and I would help him get more followers. Of course, he has since passed us and has a little more than double. He got the hang of Twitter very quickly because he’s a charming cat and he is perfect for Twitter. He is great with the fans. He shares just enough, but has just enough of Strand’s mystery to leave us wanting more.

Recently, Colman gave a nice interview to AdWeek about his relationship with fans and shared a little more about himself. It was a nice interview that wasn’t focused on the plot of the show, but on Colman. The Walking Dead family loves to get to know the cast and crew of the show just as much as they love to know about the show itself.

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Colman talked about how he loved Comic-Con because it was a part of this new experience of being on a show that has such a strong connection with fans. Periscope is something that Colman has started doing because of the fans, too.

"(About Comic-Con) I’ve never been on a show like this where there’s so much engagement with the fans.  I started doing Periscope maybe a year ago because I thought it was a great way to connect with fans. I like showing them the inner workings of a show, whether it’s my wardrobe person or talking about what different people do. There’s so many interesting people in the cast. I love that [Alycia Debnam-Carey] is an amazing musician and how funny [Frank Dillane] is, and I want to give people a sense of that."

I loved finding out that Colman likes one of my favorite shows to watch in reruns and that he has half-read books, too! Now I can feel hip about that instead of guilty. I can say, “Oh, I watch reruns of the Golden Girls and I have tons of half-read books,” and feel like I’m just like Mr. C. He once tweeted that he was popping into London before going to Madrid and I replied that I loved his use of “popping into London”–that he was so Cosmopolitan. “You know me so well,” was his response!

On television and books:

"I just got into Preacher. I’ll watch things on OWN like Belief, which is about faith. I’m always watching old episodes of The Golden Girls or The Simpsons [laughs]. It’s funny—people assume that I’m really dark like Victor Strand, but I’m actually a person who just really likes to laugh!A James Baldwin biography by David Leeming and a book called Bettyville by George Hodgman. I’ve been trying to get through this biography about Jane Fonda as well. I’m all over the place. I have so many books that are sitting around half-read. There was a Ta-Nehisi Coates book called Between the World and Me that I read the prologue, and I was so decimated by it that I couldn’t even get through the rest of the book."

As far as the zombie genre, Colman is like I was, I remember reading once that he said he was not a zombiephile. He had not seen The Walking Dead. Note to Colman: When you finish Fear, please binge watch The Walking Dead, it’s pretty amazing; you’ll get an understanding of why the fans are the way we are.

"No. I was not a deadhead. It just wasn’t in my consciousness. And [after being cast on FTWD], I didn’t go back and watch it. I started fresh because I actually thought that it would be to my benefit that I had no idea about this zombie apocalypse so that my character would be raw. I wanted Victor Strand to be as fresh as the morning dew [laughs]"

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If you are on Twitter and love Fear the Walking Dead and Victor Strand, follow Colman Domingo! He’s great with his followers. He live Tweets the show. He’s funny. He’s a fashion monster. He’s a playwright. He loves to dance and laugh. I talk with him about boots and Stevie Wonder.  To use a Seinfeld quote, “He’s real and he’s spectacular.”